History's Verdict
Harry Truman wasn't popular in office, but he is now. George Bush is hoping for the same treatment
Only 32 percent of Americans approve of his job performance. Forty-three percent say that his war was a mistake. Critics deride him as too stubborn and inflexible. Others dismiss him as an intellectual lightweight. But the president sticks to his guns. "I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he'd taken a poll in Egypt?" he writes. "It isn't polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It's right and wrong."
Sounds like President Bush, defending his policies in Iraq and the war on terrorism. Actually, it was Harry Truman in 1952, defending his conduct of the Cold War and the war in Korea.
As Bush struggles to salvage victory in Iraq and regain some political traction with his State of the Union address, the 43rd president increasingly sees himself—rightly or wrongly—in the mold of the 33rd. Bush recently told congressional leaders his own policies would be vindicated by history, just as Truman's were. Others aren't so sure.
"Both men happened to be in office when a new international challenge took place, and each dealt with it in a different way," says Boston University historian Julian Zelizer. Adds presidential scholar Doug Brinkley: "What they have in common is that both are presidents who operate out of certitude" and stayed the course despite opposition from their adversaries in Congress and doubts among the American people.
In a commencement address at West Point last May, Bush praised Truman for restructuring both government institutions and the armed forces to deal with the communist threat, and for showing bold decisiveness by ordering an airlift to break a Soviet blockade of Berlin. "By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged, and the doctrines he set down, President Truman laid the foundations for America's victory in the Cold War," Bush told the cadets. He added that America's adversaries today are similar to those Truman faced—enemies who pursue a "murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has territorial ambitions, and pursues totalitarian aims."
The problem is that at least some presidential scholars believe Bush may be exaggerating the parallels. They wonder whether his response in Iraq or his approach to terrorism measures up to the sort of hard-eyed realism or long-term vision displayed by Truman. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," says Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker. "President Bush can draw a lot of false analogies."
Adds presidential scholar Robert Dallek: "Everybody who gets into serious trouble in the presidency invokes the Truman history and the Truman experience. But there's only one Harry Truman."
These historians also tend to draw a distinction between the magnitude of the decisions thrust on Truman and those facing Bush. While Bush and his allies say he is "trying to reposition America for a new world order" in the wake of 9/11, Brinkley observes, "the Bush argument is a huge stretch. It dishonors the legacy of Truman to make the comparison."
Truman, who took over the presidency following the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, presided over the end of World War II. He ushered in the atomic age by ordering the bomb dropped on Japan. He and his aides devised a series of pathbreaking institutions to contain communism during the Cold War. Among Truman's innovations: the founding of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in 1945; the creation of the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the promotion of the Truman Doctrine, which declared America's intention to help nations combat communist insurgencies around the world, all in 1947; starting the Marshall Plan to provide massive economic aid to Europe in 1948; the Berlin airlift in 1948-49; and the NATO treaty in 1949, which placed Europe under an umbrella of U.S. security.
White House Press Secretary Tony Snow told U.S. News that Truman "laid the foundation for presidents later. President Bush wants to lay foundations for future presidents on the central point of our national security for many years to come."
Still, the critics are skeptical. Bush's creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which he initially opposed, and his other steps to fight terrorism—like reorganizing the nation's intelligence capabilities—may not measure up to Truman's achievements, according to some historians. "He's really reaching," Dallek argues. "Where is his containment doctrine, as Truman had? What is his doctrine for ending the war on terrorism?"
Yet there is one big unknown: The scholars admit that if there are no more major terrorist attacks on the United States by the end of his presidency, Bush can argue that he accomplished his most vital mission—keeping America safe. That would be an accomplishment that historians couldn't ignore. Both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have always linked the war in Iraq to the global war on terrorism. They say fighting in Iraq is keeping the "evildoers" at bay and preventing them from taking their battle into the United States.
BIG DOINGS
Truman and Bush governed during historic times. "Each period of our national history has had its special challenges," Truman said in his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 1949. "Those that confront us now are as momentous as any in the past. Today marks the beginning not only of a new administration but of a period that will be eventful, perhaps decisive, for us and for the world."
In his State of the Union address on Jan. 31, 2006, Bush made a similar point. "We've been called to leadership in a period of consequence. We've entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite," he said. "[T]he destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing."
Both presidents sought to spread democracy around the world—Truman in opposition to communism, Bush in opposition to Islamic jihadism. "Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors but also against their ancient enemies—hunger, misery, and despair," Truman proclaimed in his 1949 inaugural. Bush has echoed those themes many times.
In a statement that startled many in Washington, Bush declared in his inaugural speech on Jan. 20, 2005: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. ... So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
COMPARING KOREA AND IRAQ
It was after his surge of far-reaching Cold War initiatives in the late 1940s that Truman experienced his most bitter dilemma. In November 1950, as American and allied forces pushed North Korean invaders out of South Korea, disaster struck. China flooded the peninsula with several hundred thousand troops and pushed the United States, the South Koreans, and other coalition forces back 300 miles. Gen. Douglas MacArthur urged the administration to recognize that the United States was in a state of war with China and to drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs on Manchuria and the cities of China. Truman, fearing a world conflagration, refused to seriously consider those options. MacArthur, however, continued to promote his plan on Capitol Hill, until April 11, 1951, when Truman announced that he had fired the popular general. At the time, it was a much-criticized decision; Truman was accused of refusing to take the blame for a war gone bad. But the firing was later lauded by historians. They said the commander in chief could never allow a military officer to defy him.
Bush sees parallels in his steadfast pursuit of victory in Iraq, despite many setbacks. And Bush's removal of his top generals in early January seemed based on a Truman-like conviction that the top brass need to be on the same page as the president, this time regarding a "surge" of troops into Iraq. Gen. John Abizaid is being replaced by Adm. William Fallon as the top U.S. commander in the Mideast, and Gen. George Casey is being replaced by Lt. Gen. David Petraeus as U.S. commander in Iraq.
But Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker points out that the Korean War was a broad international operation, conducted under United Nations auspices. "It really was a multinational force," Baker says, in contrast to the Iraq war, which started as a mostly unilateral intervention, with some help from Britain, and remains largely a U.S. enterprise. Casualties in Korea, though, were far heavier. The United States has lost about 3,000 soldiers and marines in Iraq so far. The Korean War claimed more than 54,000 Americans.
THE COLD WAR AND THE WAR ON TERRORISM
"President Bush makes an explicit comparison between the beginning of the war on terror and the beginning of the Cold War," says a former senior Bush adviser who was at the president's side for most of his first term. "Truman had massive historical challenges with a nation that had grown tired. But Truman very consciously tried to put in institutional frameworks to deal with these challenges."
In his farewell address to the nation, given from the Oval Office on Jan. 15, 1953, Truman said, "I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the Cold War began to overshadow our lives. I have had hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle. ... And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb. But when history says that my term of office saw the beginning of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we have set the course that can win it."
Bush takes a different tack. "You never know what your history is going to be until long after you're gone," he says. "So presidents shouldn't worry about history. You just can't. You do what you think is right, and if you're thinking big enough, that history will eventually prove you right or wrong."
Dallek has reached his own controversial conclusion, and Bush would not be pleased. "Bush will be remembered more for the war in Iraq than the war on terrorism," the historian told U.S. News. "The war in Iraq is a disaster. And there is no grand strategy for the war on terrorism." Unless Bush can turn Iraq around or somehow elevate the war on terrorism to a historic level, "he will be seen as a failed president," Dallek contends.
Yet Bush appears to believe he is destined to win the war on terrorism, according to friends. "He believes he is there for a reason," says a confidant, "and he should try as hard as he can—and leave the rest to God."
Truman was less moralistic, emphasizing the importance of "luck and personality, forces quite beyond effort or determination," writes biographer David McCullough. "And though few presidents had ever worked so hard or taken their responsibilities so to heart in time of crisis as Truman had since the start of the war in Korea, it was luck, good and bad, and the large influence of personality that determined the course of events time and again, and never more so than in late December 1950 [shortly after China entered the Korean War], in the midst of his darkest passage."
Truman believed a president's first job was to make the tough choices. "The greatest part of the president's job is to make decisions—big ones and small ones, dozens of them almost every day," Truman said in that January 15 farewell address. "The papers may circulate around the government for a while, but they finally reach this desk. And then, there's no place else for them to go. The president—whoever he is—has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job."
Bush made a similar point to reporters last April. "I hear the voices," he declared, "and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best."
When he talks privately to friends and aides, Bush says the central question for history will be not whether he did too much in the war on terrorism but whether he did enough. "No one's going to accuse this president of not being tough enough in trying to prevent it," says a key White House adviser.
There is another parallel. In 1946, the besieged president's party lost control of both houses of Congress to the GOP, partly as a referendum on Truman and his policies. The same thing happened to the Republicans under Bush in last November's elections. Led by Truman, the Democrats made a comeback in 1948 and recaptured Congress, but four years later, in 1952, they not only lost Congress but also were ousted from the White House by Republican Dwight Eisenhower.
That can't be heartening for Bush as he ponders the next two years.
This story appears in the January 29, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.